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Authors: Patrick Dennis

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BOOK: Around the World With Auntie Mame
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“Well, for Christ's sake,” Vera said, “if she only wants to stick three feathers in her scalp and do a full curtsy, she could manage it easier than this. After all, Mame's a damned attractive woman, and a prominent one;
and
a
rich
one. The American ambassador's wife could have her presented in a
minute
.” Vera fixed me with a cold green gaze. “I suppose you think that Lady Hormone doesn't
know
that Mame's the ninth-richest widow in New York. Why, she's taking poor Mame for such a ride that . . .”

“Oh, Auntie Mame's enjoying herself,” I said. “She'd be going in for yoga or the Oxford Movement or the modern dance if she weren't so hipped on getting into Court circles.”

“Court circles, my ass!” Vera said eloquently. “I've been playing royalty on the stage for the last fifteen years and if those old frumps are anything but down-and-out deadbeats, I'm Queen Mother Mary. Anyway, it isn't the principle of the thing, Patrick, it's the money. That bitch is going to bleed poor Mame for every penny she can get and then some. Why, Mame could rent Windsor Castle for what she's paying for this mausoleum, not to mention all those servants and all the free groceries she's passing out to Gravell-Pitt's poor relations.”

“She's very generous,” I said. “Extravagant, too.”

“And yet,” Vera said, “a couple of days ago when I, Vera Charles, her oldest and dearest friend, asked her if she wouldn't like to invest a few thousand pounds in this new play I'm considering for Cochran—and a beautiful, beautiful play, Patrick, you should
see
the clothes—Mame said she didn't think she could
a ford
it. Fancy that, if you will. Never lost a nickel on one of my shows in her life and now she . . .”

“She must have been joking.”

“She was not. Hermione's got the screws into her good and proper. Here
I
can work my ass off doing eight performances a week while that slob Hermione—a total stranger, if you please—wallows around in Mame's Rolls, orders the servants around, invites her dreary chums here, shuts
me
up in this maid's room. I tell you, Patrick, that woman is sinister.”

I was so accustomed to Vera's outbursts against other women that, at first, I put her dislike of Lady Gravell-Pitt down to jealousy and didn't think much about it. But only a day or so later I began to see at firsthand that when it came to a quick deal, Hermione was next to none.

It all arose over the state of my clothes, which I had always considered neat if not flashy. “Of cawss, Mame dear,” Hermione said, gazing at me as though I were a ragpicker, “I don't see how you expect Patrick to attend the bigger dinner parties and balls inadequately clad as he is.”

I looked down to see if anything was undone, but my clothing was intact.

“Whatever do you mean, Hermie?” Auntie Mame asked absently.

“Ektualleh, Mame, a dinner coat is one thing, but for the really
gala
functions a tail coat, white tie, silk hat, opera cloak are
de rigueur
.”

“An opera cloak?” Auntie Mame laughed. “That's too silly, my dear; Patrick's only seventeen.”

“And, of cawss, for the Royal Garden Party, gray striped trousers, a cutaway, a gray topper . . .”

“Mmmmm. That
is
true,” Auntie Mame said.

“Well, I suppose that if I really get invited to any of these things,” I said, “ I can just rent the outfits from Moss Brothers. What would I ever need with a gray . . .” The words died on my lips. If I'd suggested going naked, Lady Gravell-Pitt couldn't have looked more horrified.

“Moss Brothers!” she spat, “Really, Mame, it's quite difficult enough for me to bring Ameddicans out in the best London society. But even to consider
hired
clothing . . .”

“Oh, all right,” Auntie Mame said reasonably. “He can always wear the evening clothes at college dances, and as for that Garden Party drag, I suppose he'll be an usher at someone's wedding someday. You might just run down to Dover Street, darling. I know a lot of beautifully turned-out men who have their clothes made at Kilgour, French and . . .”

“However,” Lady Gravell-Pitt said, eying me, “I know a young duke—my cousin ektualleh—who is just Patrick's size. His suits would fit perfectly and I
think
I could get him to part with the lot for, um, for a hundred guineas.” That seemed to take care of that.

Lady Gravell-Pitt was the sort of woman you dislike at first, but after you get to know her a little better you detest her. I got to know Hermione like a book, although I never overcame a sense of wonderment at her long, rawboned frame, the synthetic glory of her yellow hair and teeth. Somewhere between fifty and death, Hermie seemed to have been unduly influenced both by photographs of Lady Sylvia Ashley and some self-help article urging readers simply to emphasize their worst points. The final effect was pure Douglas Byng.

I could have forgiven Lady Gravell-Pitt her hideous physical appearance if only there had been somewhere in her makeup one kindly or generous instinct. But there was none. Hermione was one of those horrible women who make a true profession out of being a Lady. If she did not stoop to posing for face powders and cleansing creams it was because no cosmetic firm was insane enough to ask her. But I never once saw Hermione when she wasn't up to her eyeballs in a dozen little deals vaguely connected with being titled. For a fee she would get rich Canadian or Australian or American women presented at Court. At a slight consideration she could find you a dear little service flat in the West End or a duck of a house by the sea or a castle in Scotland. Hermie dealt in secondhand jewelry and silver, in used furs, in hastily cleaned ball gowns, in antiques and decorations, in household servants and social secretaries, in world cruises and sight-seeing tours of stately homes. She was delighted to lend—or rent—her name to new night clubs and restaurants, dress shops and art galleries; to anyone or anything willing to pay for the temporary use of her title. I don't
think
that she trafficked in narcotics or white slaves, but I'll bet that if I'd asked for a sniff of cocaine and a half-caste concubine, Hermione would have been on the telephone in a trice.
Service
was Hermie's byword, and, in her slightly soiled silks and satins, her frumpy furs and dirty diamonds, she looked as though she'd seen a great deal of it.

I couldn't understand just what Auntie Mame ever saw in Hermione, but on the other hand I was never too surprised by any of the fads or people my aunt picked up. Auntie Mame— who could be astonishingly astute about some people and equally gullible about others—almost reached the breaking point during Ascot Week when she learned that she hadn't been invited—nor apparently had Hermione—into the Royal Enclosure. Nor was Auntie Mame any too pleased when Vera, wearing more fox furs than the Queen herself, went sashaying off to Ascot on the arm of a naughty old duke.

“Of cawss, Mame,
nobody
nice goes to Ascot,” Hermione tried to explain weakly.

“Oh, of course not!” Auntie Mame growled. “Just the King and the Queen and Queen Mary and the Duke and Duchess of Kent—trash like that!”

“And besides, Mame,” Hermione said cloyingly, “you're entertaining the cream of Court circles at luncheon today.”

“If they're in Court circles,” Auntie Mame said, “why aren't they out at the Royal Enclosure with the
Court?
Why aren't Patrick and I? And, for that matter, why aren't
you
?” Auntie Mame said, and stamped off to her room.

After that I heard Lady Gravell-Pitt making several surreptitious and desperate-sounding telephone calls. In fact, all through the day, while Auntie Mame spread charm and caviar among the same old free loaders, Hermione was constantly excusing herself to make yet another urgent call.

Nor were the household tensions eased when Vera came back that evening with her duke, her winnings, and her impressive roster of great names with whom she had lunched alfresco or had tea or just gossiped. Vera was laying it on thick and said “Of cawss, I'm only an actress” three or four times. And when Hermione came into the room, after what must have been her hundredth urgent trip to the telephone, Vera pushed her duke forward and said, “But certainly you two must be aold, aold friends, so there's no need to introduce you.”

The duke looked absolutely blank and Hermione looked as though she could have crawled under the rug.

The duke said, “Er, I—I don't believe . . .”

Hermione said, “Of cawss,” with a dismal clack of her upper plate and excused herself once more in favor of the telephone.

The duke's title was very recent, Hermione explained later. He was no one, really.

But that night Lady Gravell-Pitt somehow managed to wangle invitations for Auntie Mame and me to the next Garden Party. She crowed with relief and pride as she raced in, flapping the envelopes aloft. Auntie Mame was delighted to think that at last she was getting somewhere in Court circles.

“There are only three, of cawss,” Hermione said horridly. “I was so soddy not to have got one for Miss Charles.”

“Thet's quate all raight,” Vera said in her stage accent, “I've had mine for days.”

THE DAY OF THE ROYAL GARDEN PARTY DAWNED unusually hot and humid. The household was in a furor. Maids scuttled up and down the corridors trailing freshly pressed dresses in their wake. Out in front, Ito polished first his buttons and then the Rolls, then the buttons again and once more the Rolls. There was even a little excitement in it for me with the arrival of my slightly used ducal clothes.

It was only when I tried to put the outfit on that I began to entertain serious doubts as to this particular tailor's superiority over Rogers Peet. The trousers were much too large and much too short. Held up with braces, as they had to be, they cleared my ankles by a good inch. If I let them down to reach the tops of my shoes, then a dazzling array of shirt front appeared between the trousers and my gray waistcoat, which happened to be so tight that all the buttons strained every time I breathed. The coat was short in the sleeves and narrow through the shoulders, but so large across the stomach that I was almost able to get it around me twice. The tie, however, was perfectly fine. I was still trying to discover a way to stand so that my new finery wouldn't look quite so grotesque when Auntie Mame called up to me from the garden.

“Patrick, my little love, do come down. We're just having a snack here before we go. It wouldn't do to be late.”

“I—I'll be down soon, Auntie Mame,” I said. “I just can't seem to get this suit right.”

“Never mind, darling,” she called, “come down and Vera and I will help you.”

Auntie Mame and Vera and Lady Gravel-Pitt were preening themselves in the hot sunlight. Auntie Mame looked very Gainsborough in her pearls, a sweeping gown of ivory with parasol to match, and on her head a platter of nodding plumes in all the colors of sweetpea. Vera, too, looked dazzling, in a stagey sort of way, in mauve lace and, to be as one again with the Queen of England, several dozen fox pelts dripping from various parts of her. Lady Gravell-Pitt's costume had quite a lot of wrinkles and some indelible spots insufficiently covered with cameos.

“Well,” I said, stepping out bravely, “you're certainly all looking . . .” I couldn't go on. I stood there frozen beneath the awe-stricken stares of Auntie Mame and Vera.

Vera was the first to speak. “Jesus,” she said, simply and succinctly.

“Patrick,” Auntie Mame gasped, “what
are
you got up as? If you think this is a joke, you're . . .”

“It's my new suit,” I said. “For the Garden Party. It just arrived.”


New?
” Vera said. “
I
should live so long. Why, it's positively green with . . .”

“Really, Hermione,” Auntie Mame said, “I
do
happen to know something about clothes, and this ridiculous getup is simply . . .”

“It's what all the best-dressed men in London are wearing,” Hermione began, but even she wasn't able to bluff it through. One look from Auntie Mame and Hermione's statement trailed off and stopped with a dismal little click of her teeth.

“It's surely just some sort of mistake,” Auntie Mame said. “Undoubtedly there's been some mix-up and Patrick has received the wrong package. This bedraggled old rag is certainly not the sort of thing that anyone would pay a hundred guineas for.”

“A hundred guineas!” Vera said and whistled.

Lady Gravell-Pitt looked so crestfallen at being caught out in her shabby trick that I almost felt sorry for her. But she rallied and said, “Of cawss. It can all be straightened out tomorrow. But now we'd best be off. It wouldn't do to keep Bertie and Bessie waiting.”

“Very well,” Auntie Mame said. “Patrick, my little love, you'll just have to make do, somehow. Perhaps no one will notice.”

“Maybe,” I said dubiously. I put on my gray topper. It sank down to the bridge of my nose.

The traffic in London has always been bad, but on that particular Garden Party day it was so heavy that it took the better part of an hour to travel the last two blocks to the gates of Buckingham Palace. Nor were matters improved when Ito nicked a very old Daimler limousine and crumpled the fender of the Peruvian Ambassador's Packard. By the time we got there the temperature in the car was about ninety and the humidity was unbearable.

Never having been to a Royal Garden Party before or since, I have no similar function with which to compare this. But the only difference I could see between the Royal Garden Party and a giant rally at Yankee Stadium is that Yankee Stadium has rest rooms and it's easier to get refreshments. We got into the receiving line behind several hundred thousand overdressed people and began inching forward in a long serpentine queue toward the marquee where the Royal family received. An hour went by and we were still standing. Vera was the first to crack. “To hell with it,” she said, and went off to join some people she knew. In fact, it seemed to me that Vera knew a lot more people in Court circles than Lady Gravell-Pitt did. Every two or three minutes someone with a most impressive title would spot Vera standing on line and barge up to greet her, whereupon Vera would introduce us all around.

BOOK: Around the World With Auntie Mame
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